Every management team needs to know how its business is performing. The answer traditionally comes from tracking revenues and expenses, which dictates profitability. Performing this analysis involves tracking current operating metrics. This analysis can be managed on any time scale – hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually – with management selecting the most relevant period.

While studying the performance of a business, it is impossible for management to divorce its business from industry conditions and trends, which include what competitors are doing. If an industry is booming, management wants to know if its business is outperforming, inline, or underperforming as a guide for operating and investment decisions.

The easiest analysis for evaluating performance is SWOT: an assessment of the company’s operating strengths and weaknesses, and an evaluation of the market opportunities and threats present, usually as envisioned by management, analysts, and industry consultants.

While SWOT is a useful guide to understanding the state of a business, knowing where your company stands within your industry is important. In 1979, Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter created an analysis model that examines five specific factors that determine whether a business can be profitable compared to others in the industry. Porter’s Five Forces is considered a macro tool in business analytics – studying the industry’s economy overall. SWOT is a microanalytic tool that zeros in on specific company data and analysis.

Getting competitor performance data is crucial for comparative purposes. Management teams expend extensive time and effort gathering competitor information for their analysis. Many information sources exist. Depending on the specific industry, gathering the data can be easier or harder. It often depends on the degree of industry regulation. Generally, the greater the regulation, the more operating data is reported. Management’s challenge is collecting this data, which often requires manual extraction for use in competitor analysis spreadsheets. Depending on how quickly data is reported and the manpower a company can devote to tracking and recording the data, competitor analyses are often late.

Moves by regulators to require companies to file their data using more flexible financial software may both reduce management’s time in preparing their data filings and in extracting competitor data. In an age of increased inflation, rapidly shifting market trends, and greater competition, having access to competitor operating data quicker will help management teams better navigate the changing business landscape.

For this Company Spotlight, we interviewed HData’s CEO (Hudson Hollister) about how they are digitizing the interface between the regulatory and private sectors by creating and scaling platforms that take advantage of digital reporting. HData’s platform uses regulatory data to automate compliance and business intelligence for electric utilities, natural gas local distribution companies, natural gas pipelines, and oil pipelines. For more information on HData, please visit www.hdata.us.

Background: Before launching HData’s first product in 2021, Hudson Hollister started his career as an attorney specializing in corporate securities law for Latham & Watkins and the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC). It was during that time that he realized how inefficient and ineffective the regulatory reporting process is for both corporations and regulatory agencies, as reports are submitted via PDFs that are….. READ MORE

Linea Energy (“Linea” or the “Company”) is a newly formed independent power producer modernizing how clean energy is developed and financed to rapidly increase the speed of deployment. Linea’s partnership with EnCap Investments positions the Company to execute on its growth strategy of accelerating the decarbonization of the U.S. electricity grid through developing, owning, and operating utility-scale wind, solar, and battery energy storage projects. Linea will build its portfolio through greenfield development and strategic project acquisitions.

Station Electric, based in California, is a general engineering contractor specializing in substation construction that has experience with aerial and overhead, underground, transition, distribution and generation projects. KV Power, founded in 2012, is a complete electrical infrastructure solutions company focused principally on the electrical transmission infrastructure, distribution, substation and electrical automation & instrumentation services to utilities and infrastructure owners.

Certarus is the North American leader in providing on-road low carbon energy solutions through a fully integrated CNG, renewable natural gas and hydrogen platform. Certarus safely delivers clean burning fuels to energy, utility, agricultural and industrial customers not connected to a pipeline. By displacing more carbon intensive fuels, Certarus is leading the energy transition and helping customers lower operating costs and improve environmental performance. Superior Plus (“Superior”) is a leading North American distributor and marketer of propane and distillates and related products and services, servicing over 890,000 customer locations in the U.S. and Canada. The acquisition of Certarus accelerates Superior’s energy transition path with a business that is both rapidly growing and accretive to Superior’s financial results.

Texas Molecular specializes in handling, treatment, and sequestration of various liquid hazardous and non-hazardous industrial wastes. Texas Molecular is one of the largest independent providers of industrial waste sequestration services in the United States, managing over 75 million gallons annually, and has facilities in Deer Park and Corpus Christie, Texas. VLS Environmental Solutions (“VLS”) provides waste processing solutions for hazardous and non-hazardous industrial and commercial waste, railcar cleaning and repair, and marine services cleaning and repair. With the acquisition of Texas Molecular, VLS has expanded its environmental services capabilities into hazardous waste processing and sequestration to serve the diverse and growing needs of its industrial customers across North America.

Related Press Release: VLS Environmental Solutions Acquires Texas Molecular

Volta is an industry-leading electric vehicle charging and media company. Volta's unique network of charging stations powers vehicles and drives business growth while accelerating a clean energy future. Volta delivers value to site hosts, brands, and consumers by installing charging stations that feature large-format digital advertising screens located steps away from the entrances of popular commercial locations. This acquisition builds on the momentum in electric mobility by combining one of the leading EV charging and media companies in the U.S. with one of the world's largest energy suppliers. The transaction provides the opportunity for Shell to unlock Volta's significant signed pipeline of charging stalls in construction or evaluation and capture the seismic EV charging market opportunity.

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Measuring Corporate Performance is Critical for Management Teams